Saturday, December 6, 2014

Burning the Midnight Oil . . .

Four or five years ago, on a whim or a hunch we decided to try a Thanksgiving Weekend Sale and were overwhelmed by your response. So we did it again . . . and again . . . and again . . . and by now I think some of you have gotten the idea that we’re going to do it every year. So we were pretty sure that it was going to be a busy couple of weeks. We had no idea . . .

And so it was that my supervisor and I arrived at our store shortly after 6:00 on Friday evening to gather materials needed to fill your orders. It’s hard to stay on task during the work day – something else needs my attention, the phone rings, a customer has a question . . . you get the idea. In the evening, it’s quiet and uninterrupted – I didn’t even have a ballgame on the radio to distract me.

The supervisor checked on me every now and then as I matched items with orders, and boxes started filling so that I could take everything back to the mail center – where today I am going through them again to see which orders are ready to ship and which need an item or two that we need to order.

Unlike me, the supervisor occasionally got distracted . . .

Eventually, six boxes and Zoe were ready to leave. I loaded all of them into my truck and went back to turn out the lights.

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Welcome!

This has been a work in progress for a long time. I suspected for a long time that we needed to start a blog where we could post information, pictures and such. But it took Cheryl Darrow from Ten Seconds Studio to finally convince me to take the plunge.

When I started building our website more than 18 years ago, I barely knew how to turn on a computer. I learned a lot and got a lot of good advice along the way, we rebuilt it five years ago, and now I can update it in my sleep. This blog is much the same -- at the outset I had only a vague idea how this page would best serve our customers. It has become a place to post pictures from conventions, tutorials, a quick sale notice, some of my stream of consciousness thinking, and pictures of my dog from time to time. I have also discovered a group of foodies who enjoy my recipes and a group of prayer warriors who helped carry my mom through chemotherapy.

You folks are great -- most of the best ideas we've ever had weren't ours at all. They came from our customers.

Someday I'll tell the story of how we entered the world of rubber stamp conventions, mail order, wacky costumes, and more. Again, it wasn't our idea -- two of our customers get all the credit.